What Lies in the Woods(14)

“See? Sarcasm. No variety,” Dad said. His laugh had a raspy rattle to it. “Is that all you wanted? To give me a hard time and go?”

“Apparently.”

“You need a place to stay?”

“I’m good,” I told him. I started to leave, stopped. “I … I’ll come back tomorrow, okay? Before I leave town.”

“Don’t go out of your way for me,” he said. He turned his back on me, shuffling over to one of the leaning piles of food. He started pawing through it. “There’s a stack of mail for you by the front door. Get it on your way out. It’d be easier to clean if I didn’t have your crap around here, too.”

I sighed. “Yeah. I’ll do that.” I picked my way out of the kitchen. How was I supposed to help someone who didn’t want my help? It wasn’t like he’d ever done a thing for me, other than not kick me out. I didn’t owe him a goddamn thing. Except that he was my dad.

I stood in the doorway, trying to figure out which pile of stuff was supposed to be mine. Finally I spotted it under an unopened Amazon package: a stack of mail two inches deep. Probably a few months’ worth.

“Yeah, my mail was definitely the problem. The rest will be a breeze,” I muttered. Most of it looked like credit card offers and other junk, but near the bottom of the stack there was one hand-addressed envelope. Probably “fan mail.” Someone who’d heard my story on a podcast and wanted to tell me how inspiring I was or explain their pet theories about the case. I stalked out to the car and threw the mail in the passenger seat, and then sat with my head against the wheel, remembering how to breathe again. “Fuck,” I said at last, and started the engine.

I held on to my anger all the way back into town.





I still hadn’t had anything to eat all day, so I parked myself at the café, with its dubious Wi-Fi connection and endless coffee refills. I found myself a seat in the back, ordered a soup and sandwich, and pulled out my laptop to work on editing last weekend’s wedding.

Time fell away from me, as it often did when I got into the rhythm of editing. It was hours later that I remembered to look at the clock—and to straighten my shoulders and stretch my aching back.

I stuffed a twenty in the tip jar on my way out as compensation for camping out for so long and went to get a room at the Chester Motel. It didn’t have bedbugs and did have cable, which made it the Chester equivalent of the Four Seasons, at least until you got as far out as the lodge.

I checked my phone when I got into the room in case I had a message from Liv or Cass, but there were just a bunch of texts from Mitch. Wondering where I was. Being pointedly not upset that I’d sneaked out before dawn.

I had told him I was leaving for Chester. Just hadn’t mentioned when. Plus, we’d broken up. My whereabouts weren’t his business anymore.

I deleted the texts and collapsed back on the bed. Without the work to distract me, my mind thrashed its way inevitably back to the things I least wanted to think about. What were we going to do about Persephone?

It was like a bullet left in a body. The flesh had healed around it; digging it out would cause more damage than leaving it. Stahl dying had sparked new interest in our story, but that would be fleeting; the story belonged to the past. This would be different.

I wished I didn’t care—that I could be like Liv and want only for Persephone to find her way home.

But why should she be able to leave the woods, when I never had?



* * *



I woke up an hour later, jolting out of the recursive chase my mind had concocted—monsters in the forest, a trail that looped and twisted and plunged. My mouth was dry, my head fuzzy. I felt like deer jerky that had been in a hot glove box for a week, and my mouth tasted about the same. And of course I hadn’t remembered to pack a toothbrush.

I combed my hair into a semblance of respectability and walked the hundred yards to the gas station shop next door to find myself a toothbrush. The inside of the Corner Store looked exactly the same as it had when we were kids, simultaneously overcrowded and understocked all at once, with bumper stickers indicating a less than progressive political stance plastered over every inch of the front counter.

The string of bells over the door jingled as I entered, and Marsha Brassey, who’d gained about fifty years of wrinkles in the past two decades, looked up from her Sudoku and pressed a hand over her heart.

“My goodness, if it isn’t Naomi Shaw,” she said.

“It’s Cunningham now, Marsha,” I corrected with strained patience, tired of saying it.

“Oh, that’s right. I’m sorry—getting dotty in my old age,” Marsha said, flapping a hand helplessly.

“Tell you what, I’ll let it slide as long as you never make me pay off my Snickers tab.”

She reached over to the candy rack and grabbed a bar to waggle in my direction. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

I took it with a smile, like I didn’t remember her smacking my backside with a broom for even looking too long at the candy she knew I didn’t have the money to buy. Every bad thing that had ever been said about me dissolved like sugar in water when I turned into a miracle. When Chester suddenly decided that after a childhood of being on the outside, I belonged to them.

“What brings you back to town?” Marsha asked as I worked my way down the aisles, grabbing the toiletries I’d left behind.